In Animation and 3D: the web is doing it wrong, I argue that the way the web does animation and 3D is completely bogus and deserves to die. With Tao Presentations, we offer a dynamic document description language that lets us write shorter code that is much closer to storytelling. We’d like to bring this to the web.

Have you ever created a dynamic animation on a web site, or displayed a 3D object? Really, why is it so complicated? Why should I learn how to use half a dozen libraries, write dozens of line of boilerplate HTML, WebGL and CSS code, just to rotate some text on the screen or display a 3D object? Why do I need three (or four, or five) languages, libraries or frameworks to design a single animated web page?
In the realm of business presentations, Tao Presentations solved this problem with a 3D dynamic document description language, letting you easily create sophisticated interactive 3D animations and presentations. What if we brought this very innovative platform to the web? What kind of applications would become possible if we improved web browsers in the areas of storytelling, interactivity, 3D or multimedia?

Recently, a user of Tao Presentations informed us that Google Chrome displayed a dire warning after he downloaded our software: “Tao Presentations may be malicious software”. Uh oh, for the average Joe, that’s a big no-no.

Google locks out “unapproved” programs

It’s not just us. Recently, I tried to download some of the amazing demos created by Iñigo Quilez. Same thing. Seriously, a 4K exe that manages to display a complete mountain? And Google Chrome would have me believe that there’s room in there for “malicious software”? Get real.

Now, it took me quite a while to find a solution to this problem. Apparently, you just need to record your site in Google’s Webmaster tools, and after scanning your site and ensuring (I assume) that there’s no known virus signature in the files, things should improve.

I still find this really annoying that a browser vendor would, by default, tag unknown files as “malicious”. Who are they to make this judgment call?

Why didn’t Google implement a real solution?

Shouldn’t they instead have something a little more sophisticated, that actually detects malicious signatures? You know, like a real anti-virus? Don’t tell me that Google doesn’t have smart enough engineers to write an in-browser anti-virus that doesn’t completely suck.

Nah, instead they went the easy route: anything that we don’t know is malicious. And we tell your users so.

I used to be a big fan of Chrome. Not anymore. Because of this single issue. I think this demonstrate an incredibly stupid arrogance and lack of technical diligence on Google’s part.

Google overstepped its authority and took advantage of their weight. Let’s not get used to it.

This article explains how Tao Presentations proceeds to transform a document (.ddd) into images on the screen. It describes an interesting mechanism making it easy to create dynamic documents that depend on events such as time or mouse movements. Moreover, this technique also allows Tao Presntations to optimize the rendering of graphic elements, enabling smooth 60Hz drawings even with complex contents.